The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Much brighter cyan flashes lit the night: the tanks of Dog Company punched the ridgeline five klicks away with their main guns. Their thunder echoed across the fields.

Huber checked the C&C display, then said, “Fox Three, there was a Nonesuch infantry company picketed on the reverse slope. They moved into position and the panzers are taking care of them. Three-six out.”

One of the eight Nonesuch APCs opened fire before it had reached the crest. The bolts of its tribarrels streaked five hundred meters over the Slammers in a rising slant. When the APC advanced high enough that its gun might have been able to bear on the attackers, the tank which had been waiting for a target fired. A brilliant secondary explosion lifted skyward a divot of soil and wood-chips.

Moments later, a bum! bum! bum! directly overhead made Huber twist to look up. Cargo shells from Battery Alpha had opened at low altitude, sending fingers of smoke toward the ridgeline. Their thousands of anti-personnel bomblets hit to carpet the target with lingering white flashes, scouring the hasty positions of Nonesuch infantry who’d dismounted before their APCs tried to engage.

Dirty smoke hung over half a kilometer of the hilltop. Huber could penetrate it with thermal imaging, but there was nothing to see except bare rock and the pulped remnants of the trees and shrubs that had grown there moments before. The enemy troops and their equipment had vanished except for the continuing sizzle of a battery pack shorting through commo gear, forming a hotspot on the image.

“Nothing for us there,” Deseau said cheerfully. He patted his tribarrel’s receiver. “Well, we’ll have our chance yet tonight, I figure.”

“Fox Three, this is Fox Six,” Captain Gillig ordered. “Move up on the left flank of Fox One, keeping ten meter intervals between vehicles. We’ll take firing positions below the crest. Six out.”

Huber tensed as his faceshield flashed warnings. Chuckling, he relaxed. The squadron had torn through the fence separating the wheatfield from the pasture on the rougher terrain to the north. Wire flew up in springy coils around the vehicles, and the tug jerked the posts out of the ground in front of F-3. The motion was the same quick flicker men would make leaping to cover.

The northern sky quivered as with heat lightning. “Hoo-boy!” Deseau said. “Some a’ them firecracker rounds are landing where they ought to. I tell you, with a division of ’em down there, I don’t mind a bit a’ help from the cannon cockers.”

“We get paid the same if we get shot at or if we don’t, Frenchie,” Padova said. Her voice sounded artificially bright, but Fencing Master slid as if on rails to where it belonged on the left flank of the Squadron. “I’d just as soon get easy money.”

Deseau laughed. Huber glanced at him, then looked away. Frenchie wasn’t suicidal: he figured the risks that came with the job were plenty bad enough without doing crazy stuff. But when Frenchie had a chance to kill, the fact he might die didn’t concern him.

Fencing Master started up the final rise, tearing through three-meter shrubs with as little difficulty as it’d had with the wheat. Huber glanced back. Plenum chamber pressures compressed and deformed the loose earth of the plowed fields. Each of the vehicles had left a trench the full width of its skirts with a mound of soil and young shoots to either side.

Huber kept most of his attention on the Command and Control display. His cars were in the same condition as when they left the firebase, fully ready for battle if not for a rear-area inspection. The rest of the squadron was in similar shape, though a Golf Company car had lost a pair of fans and lagged behind on the slope. Sometimes bad luck was the only kind of luck there was; but if the car had been in Huber’s platoon, tomorrow its sergeant/commander would be proving the problem wasn’t because of a maintenance failure.

If the sergeant/commander survived, of course. And if Huber did.

Three shells from the Nonesuch battery burst several klicks back, sending spouts of black earth into the sky. Air defense hadn’t bothered with them since they were no more danger to the Slammers than they were to the guns which’d fired them.

“Fox Three, this is Three-six,” Huber said, glad to have good news to point out to his troopers a few seconds before they jumped into a tough one. “The hostiles are shooting where we used to be, so they don’t have us under direct observation. When we reach our firing positions, we’re going to get the first shot. If we can’t kick their asses then, Via! we don’t belong in this line of work! Six—”

Because of the way the ridge curved, Fencing Master pushed through the brush into a clear view of Port Plattner a heartbeat before the rest of the squadron did. Huber already had his tribarrel aimed at a predicted location even before his faceshield gave him real targets.

He squeezed the butterfly trigger as he shouted, “—out!” to his platoon.